November 2004 - Posts
Although the TechNet Subscriber site was nominally moved over to be part of MSDN Subscriber Online a few weeks back, the recent launch adventure that we had has been a bit of a forcing factor for me to drive ownership of the site. So, because I don't have anything better to do, I'll be working on both short term and long term visions for the SOS site. In the short term we'll be releasing some bug fixes and minor updates, but in the long term I'd like to see about a shared codebase for both MSDN and TechNet subscriber sites. Anyway, if people have ideas for a synergistic experience between the two programs, let me know.
Should be released tomorrow - I have the WinFX SDK Community Technology Preview build replicating to all worldwide servers now. I believe it'll be avaliable for Pro, Ent, and Uni subscription levels. Check the site in the afternoon to be safe - I don't have an exact time-of-day for when I'll be able to publish the Table of Contents. It'll be, however, in the
Tools, SDKs, DDKs | Platform Tools folder. Let me know what you think, I used to be technical (My MCSE certs were for MSMail and Win NT 3.51), but have gotten more into the project side and so can't keep up with you kids today and your newfangled technologies, zima, and breakdancing.
Customer Service Representatives now have some build 1247 beta keys for the x64 editions of Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP Pro. Because it looks like they'll be using a special beta key for these products until release, I'm working to add a key to the My Product Keys page for the betas, but this takes a bit of time, especially around the holidays. So, the descriptions for the products have been updated to link subscribers to the phone number page for CSRs so they can request a key. I'm hoping to be able to ditch the workaround in the next week or two.
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In about two weeks the PSS owners of the Online Chat and Managed Newsgroup system, and I'll be sitting down with them for a few hours to work out requirements for these benefits in the MSDN and TechNet subscription programs. I have my own thoughts on the utility and functionality of these benefits, but if there are specific requests for "Community" benefits, please let me know and I'll see about driving them if it makes sense. A few cautionary notes:
1. I know that the "nospam" process for managed newsgroups sucks. I hate it too, and this for me is a key issue, so the registration suckiness will be addressed in general, but I'm interested in specific feature requests for a newsgroup benefit.
2. Questions not being answered is typically a problem with nospam alias, as in #1 above, so complaints will be slotted into that bucket
3. Are there any other Community benefits besides Chat and Newsgroup that you'd like to see? In the long term I'll want to move to a Forums-based system, but should there be a Community benefit in the subscription (MSDN or TechNet) beyond "Chat" and "Newsgroup/Forum".
The current Xena Table of Contents uses a system called Deeptree to render layers of organized content and references a description page for each content item. It was written, I believe, in around 1997 and is largely unchanged from then. I think you can even look it up as a code sample on MSDN Online - for the time it was pretty slick. However, it uses DHTML to collapse the menu items, which was dropped by everyone but Microsoft when we *ahem* "extended" the standard. (As a disclaimer here, I won't publish any comments regarding the right or wrong of DHTML or Java support, both sides had their issues). When the site was designed, however, I don't believe anyone planned on this happening and so the site works fine for IE browsers, but pretty much tanks for anything else. The use of ActiveX to do checks and updates for File Transfer Manager is also a cross-browser issue, we handle it poorly today.
As we started work on Xena 3.0 about a year ago, one of my priority 1 requirements was to make the site fully cross-browser compatible. Funnily enough, the operations team (who tend to be pretty focused) told me that losing Deeptree wasn't required, because 99.5% of our client browsers were IE. I was able, however, to make the point that this could possibly be the case because we only support IE (after explaining that "support" is different from "can be accessed") and so that might possibly be a factor. The net-net of this is that cross-browser compatibility for Firefox, Opera, and IE will be included in the update for all major site functions.
I was getting some tattoo work done last week and they were playing mc chris, who is just a riot. I'm a lukewarm rap fan, but any techie has to love a song called, "I wanna be a Stormtrooper". One of the lines is, "I should join the Empire. I know they're evil, but their uniforms are way cool"
UPDATE: OK, it's "mc chris" - sorry, it's not like I have his poster over my bed or anything.
UPDATE 2: Dang it, "Stormtrooper" isn't one of his songs, but "fette's vette" is, and that's also pretty cool.
1. Just spent nearly two full weeks with the several teams that run the various aspects of the subscription program to come up with the architecture for the new MSDN Subscriber Downloads login page. It looks like with the next major release (due about mid-next-year) we'll be able to have multiple subscriptions associated with a single Passport, in some cases we'll know about them automatically and in all other cases we'll provide an "add subscription to this Passport" functionality. There are still some issues around TechNet subscription integration and LadyBugg integration - so I'm not committing to these as yet.
2. Build 1247 of Windows Server 2003 requires a different key type, so I've pulled the build until we get this figured out. Basically, 1247 requires an activation key for the 32-bit and AMD 64-bit builds, but not the IA64 builds. I don't really want to publish production keys for a test build, and I don't want to tell customers to use their one WS03 key for a test build, so I'm looking at options. Let me know your thoughts on how you as a customer would like this handled if you like - the third option is to give some keys to the customer service reps and let them give one out to those subscribers who ask for them.
3. Pretty much everything from the January 05 media shipment is in Xena, with the exception of WS03 SP1 1247. Academic Alliance customers will get Virtual PC for Mac 7.0 here in the next few days, but that's about it in terms of new content.
There's a known issue with running FTM on a WinXP with SP2 machine that's never installed FTM before. I've published a workaround on this here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/xpsp2/, and have made fixing this problem a top priority for the server operations guys. Basically the issue is around how we use ActiveX controls to check to see whether an FTM update is available, since these are no longer auto-accepted we're seeing a number of FTM install failures. Anyway, I'm working on the requirements for an FTM update and this'll be the first thing addressed.
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